Minimizing peak load from information cascades: Social networks meet cellular networks

Abstract

Online social networks (OSNs) serve today as a platform for information dissemination. At the same time, mobile devices provide ubiquitous network access through the cellular infrastructure. In this paper, we develop mechanisms for minimizing the peak load of the cellular network due to information cascades spreading on social media. First, we exploit the social ties for predicting information dissemination and we propose Proactive Seeding-a technique for minimizing the peak load of cellular networks. Much of such a load is due to information cascades spreading in social media, and we address it by proactively pushing (“seeding”) content to selected users before they actually request it. We develop a family of algorithms that take as input information primarily about: (i) cascades on the OSN, (ii) the background traffic load in the cellular network, and (iii) the local connectivity among mobiles; the algorithms then select which nodes to seed and when. We prove that Proactive Seeding is optimal when the prediction of information cascades is perfect. We perform simulations driven by traces from Twitter and cellular networks and we find that Proactive Seeding reduces the peak cellular load by 20-50 percent. Then, we exploit the fact that there is correlation between social ties and physical proximity and we combine Proactive Seeding with device-to-device communication to further reduce the peak load.